Roots
by La Editor
Summary: Because Yuffie wants to fall down unafraid, because Vincent wants to crawl into her skin, because these are the ties that last. A series of one-shots for him, her, them. Yuffentine.
1. Roots

A/N: Instead of posting _every single Yuffentine I write_ separately, I'm putting them together neat-like. It sure makes everything a lot easier. Much thanks to T Costa and Pen Against Sword for betaing all of my words - how you guys put up with me is a mystery, and you deserve everything in the world for your patience.

This piece is ultimately inspired by _Rusted Roots' _song _Send Me On My Way. _I love this song to the moon and back, infinity times over.

* * *

Roots

* * *

"It's always the little things, isn't it?"

She is crouching at the base of the tree like a squirrel, unmoving and altogether silent, outside of the tent in the cool air of early morning. The moon is silent like the hiding sun and the sky bleeds blue, clear like the summer pond he filled his flask up with yesterday. This is the first thing she has said to him.

Vincent looks at Yuffie.

"…What do you mean?"

But he thinks that he knows what she means. Very well, actually, and for her picking up on that is mildly frightening for him. Vincent is not one to fear other people. He is surprised that she is not intimidated by him, like the others are.

"Nevermind. Go back to sleep, ducky."

Vincent is genuinely befuddled for the first time in many, many years – years, years turned to decades, isn't that right – and his mind protests such a rather demeaning nickname, but his open eyes find her, and he is again surprised to find that she is not unmoving and silent at all. She is quivering with the promise of motion, and her mouth is trembling from anticipation to form a sound like a writhing newborn, naked and unsure and full of life.

She is smiling at him. Cheekily, very much a teenager. A child.

He looks again and she is alive and much, much older.

(He blinks and forgets what he saw.)

It is early in the morning with the moon still like she would never be, and she is something radically new and something that he finds himself wanting to swallow whole. Vincent has forgotten himself and doesn't even know it in his dazed state; his eyes drift shut to the sight of her creeping towards the butterfly that beats its small white wings slowly, before pouncing and laughing openly as it escapes her with those wings that still flap, unwavering forever in a steady rhythm.

-

Between Vincent, Red XIII, and Yuffie, there is a common understanding; Vincent doesn't care, much, but he is relieved that they are a group.

All very much different in their own ways.

He doesn't think any of them handle people well.

When he tries to stop thinking – thinking – (restsleepstaygowaitpleasewhyloveyouhateyouBANG) – thinking, when he stops trying – when he tries stopping which he shouldn't, but does sometimes because he's incredibly weak, Vincent notices that Nanaki seems uncomfortable in towns, unsure and unlike the beast (not unlike Vincent, who still sometimes reaches with his claw or wants to ruffle his hair and can't keep his eyes off the ground in crowds). Yuffie is guarded around strangers, which doesn't make sense until Vincent realizes that she does this exactly by being open.

"…There is a lake, perhaps thirty meters or so east," Nanaki informs them suddenly, flicking his tail when they are in the wilderness of the western continent. Sparks fall away, sizzling and dying before hitting the ground.

"I regret to say it, but our chances of encountering monsters that could otherwise be avoided are heightened largely by the scent of both of you. Your clothing is beginning to smell rank."

"Heeey, whadabout you, huh? You smell pretty funky, too, don't single US out!"

"I smell like an animal," the beast answers. "Common. My scent is no different from a wolf, currently. If I bathed I would smell like my own species, which would also attract predators. You both reek of sweat, dirt and blood that… is not common among most animal species."

They go to the lake.

Later, after siphoning off the dirt from their sore selves, they also end up sleeping there, next to the water that is deathly still, as the moon reflects everything backwards.

Vincent stands and watches it for a long, long time before turning his head. (For some reason, he can't turn completely away.)

He watches his sleeping companions.

Yuffie is sleeping against Nanaki, curled against his side. They breathe together, and they are very comfortable with each other. Perhaps it is the fact that they are both so young. Or that they were the only real outcasts before Vincent joined the group.

Yuffie looks younger, like this. She looks like a child, and Vincent watches her small fist curl a little tighter around the rich-colored red fur. Sleeping. Easy in, easy out.

She is a child, only a child, and Vincent's human hand flexes in a short twitch. He could break her neck. Save her from things that he's seen and done because this is a dangerous road that they're all traveling on. Vincent has already gone down it. Maybe more times than he can count.

He could snap her neck in half cleanly, efficiently, rearrange it to look like she had died of poison. In her sleep, never knowing. Save that innocence she will one day mourn the loss of.

His stomach clenches painfully and Vincent's eyes sting. She is the liveliest of the bunch.

Yuffie's eyes open blearily.

And he wonders how he could think her a child at all.

"Get over here, vampy," she calls out, and makes him sit close to the other side of Nanaki, though he doesn't lay down on the creature as she does. "…Makin' me feel bad. Ain't got nothin' but dirt-shit, damn straight, left our stupid bags with the others 'cuz Tifa was feelin' real sick. I feel like Cid." She rambles, now, and Vincent feels like retching for thinking. Add another sin to the list, and this one is all his own and he's getting worse. And he doesn't know what that means, but his skin crawls and his left hand pulses and throbs as he thinks of rotting flesh.

"Hey-hey, if I puked I bet it'd come up tar. All that crap smokers inhale…" she yawns and her eyes begin to close, "like mama's tea… miss them all, yunno, but back to Leviathan flowing back…'n I'll kill Rufus next time I see him… worst babysitter ever, shoulda kicked 'im real good when I had the chance…"

She doesn't seem to be speaking to him. Yuffie falls asleep again.

Vincent feels warmer despite the cool night breeze. His friends are to his right and the moon sits off on his left, and he falls asleep facing the stars straight above.

-

A different place, a different time and Vincent banks the fire to the cool twilight air as the others pull up their sleeping bags, and he will take watch tonight. It's been a long day, a long day, and he's unsure and silent and wants to curl up in his own secondhand bag that is bright yellow, courtesy of one ninja until they can get him his own. Long day – long day, long decade long _life, _and he is so incredibly tired that he just wants to curl up like the little boy he isn't in the yellow secondhand sleeping bag, and never get up again.

(He doesn't admit this feeling to himself.)

These people are very close, he thinks. The sky is clear enough that they all mutually decide it a waste to pull out the tents, and Vincent sees why when he looks up.

The sky is clear like a marble as twilight sets in.

(I wish I were the sky, he thinks. And then he feels mildly ridiculous and tries to look away.)

Aeris says a soft goodnight that echoes, magnified, through the emptiness of their camping space at the edge of an open meadow, green and every blade swaying in the quiet breeze. There is a murmured reply of the same from the others.

Vincent sits against a tree. He will take watch tonight, he can't help looking at the sky, he can't stop. His eyes won't look away, and it's vaguely alarming in a very slow, tired sense of the word.

Vincent finally tears his eyes from the expanse above them all. (It is almost painful.) He watches his companions for a moment.

Yuffie is not among their number. He looks up again, as high as his neck tilts his head back, and her leg is swinging tiredly against the base of the tree she leans against as well from her spot on a thick, bland wood branch.

"Take your sleeping bag."

She twists her body in a way that makes him wonder if she will fall. She doesn't, and instead, leans toward where she sees him. Her hair, short and boyish, falls around her face towards the ground.

"I'm taking over your watch at half-night," is the reply, in a rather bouncy sort of voice. She has an accent, he notices. Slight. Very slight, but it slips through every so often. (Like his.) Nice to listen to. "Save myself the trouble, anyway. Sides, 's safer up here."

"…Safer?"

"Monsters," she replies immediately, yawning loud and fake. "Attracted to big groups. I'll use my own once we all split up again. I've been sleeping in trees all my life, Dr. Depress-o. One more night shouldn't kill me."

She seems content to leave it at that.

Vincent looks up. Her foot still swings, steady on its own beat.

There is silence for a moment, with only the wind against the trees and the grass, and the crickets and distant wildlife.

"Is it?" he finds himself whispering.

There is shuffling as she flips around on the tree, arms and legs hanging limply, her face above his own. It is young. Younger than he looked, at sixteen.

She opens her eyes. Old. Older than he looked, at sixteen.

"Does thirty years of bed-hair give you lice?"

He doesn't reply, and only watches her, her with her eyes closed and a childish face and then she says, "thought so," and then doesn't say anything after that.

Four hours later, when the moon is pouring cool air and white from her shining face, Vincent stands.

"Yuffie," he says. She vaults down, surprisingly limber, and lands on her feet wide-awake. She slides wordlessly down to sit in the place he was occupying moments before, her weapon loosely in hand as she makes herself comfortable.

"…It is," she quietly confirms later, much later when he is inside the beat-up bright yellow sleeping bag.

Yuffie is very much the same as him. Very much alone around people. Unable to connect. Never really understanding them.

But Yuffie pretends to, he thinks.

She is an old woman waiting to drown, she is a young child flailing in the ocean.

"I want to set the sky on fire," she tells him unexpectedly. The words echo through the sky that is forever blue, and he falls asleep to the comforting sound.

-

It is morning, and they sit together.

This is how the groupings fell, and they seem to stick together. They are both outcasts in their own rights.

She doesn't seem very comfortable around people. But she smiles, mostly, cheeky and childish when her eyes aren't old, jumpy and unable to sit still.

"I dunno how to act around people," she announces to him, sounding like she wants to know tomorrow's weather. Yuffie sits across from him; they are in a cheap restaurant, connecting to the inn, sitting in a small wooden booth that is the color of bright oak. A window that takes up the entire expanse of the wall Vincent faces lets in mid morning sunlight. Yuffie faces away from it, both feet drawn from the floor and a sugar packet in one hand, a bright red apple in the other. She fiddles with both. He's found that she tends to do this, no matter how she feels or acts or what she says.

"You pretend you do," he tells her.

The sun flows into his eyes, her small form the only block. It goes over the top of her head. Yuffie looks like a child, Yuffie looks like an old woman.

Vincent blinks, and Yuffie looks like Yuffie.

"But I _don't. _I am selfish," she states this matter-of-factly. "I was on my own for so long that I forgot. I prob'ly even forgot all of the stupid lessons I had to learn. They were torture. Except rope-escape classes. I am now an advocate of believing you _cannot have too many rope-escape classes_. But the other ones sucked. Like tea ceremonies. Man, I hated those," she is saying conversationally as she dumps the whole sugar package into her mouth.

He never knows quite what to say to her.

"I… don't know very much about people. We are similar in that respect." He is not trying to sympathize. Vincent does not sympathize, empathize, comfort. (He was in the Turks of his own accord.)

This brings him back to reality.

Many things he has been hiding behind his eyelids burst forward.

"We crazies have to stick together," Yuffie is telling him absently as she focuses on the apple that she rolls down her shoulder to flick off of her wrist and catch.

He doesn't reply.

A dog barks happily in the background and goes running to splash through the slowly-vanishing puddles across the street, through the window, a blur of gold across the cobblestone. A boy trails after it, with a smile so wide it could crack a star clean in two.

-

They are in their lonely threesome again, looking for their Aeris.

Vincent doesn't know when she became theirs, but there it is – they're all a sort of family now, though he hesitates on the thought, on the word, they're all a sort of family now and if Vincent is honest with himself (something he finds he isn't often) they all seem to hold bits and pieces of each other together.

The Northern Continent is truly a sight. The temperature leaves their breath white, and the clouds swirl above to hide the sun, while the air is clean and the rivers are so cold they make his teeth ache bitter-sweetly. They walk along one.

"Red, d'you pick anything up?" Yuffie kicks a rock absently.

She's worried. Genuinely worried, and she hides it but her eyes are old and her ears prick every so often for a sound that Vincent knows she is hoping to be a giggle, a fumble, a song.

"…This is not the direction she would have gone," Nanaki replies evenly after a moment. "Aeris's scent isn't even close. Cloud sent us in this direction, but I have the feeling we should turn back."

They all share one glance. And they each understand each other, to an extent, because they are a sort of family.

Vincent is not surprised when they all turn around at the same moment to retrace their steps, Red leading the way. Yuffie and Vincent follow, and the set pace is fast. They care about their Aeris. Vincent also cares about Aeris – she was respectful to him, until they talked. And then he became another AVALANCHE-er, to Aeris, another piece of the family and that was something; it was unexpected, and she reminds him of his mother that he barely remembers, and doesn't think of very often.

"Shi—" Yuffie fumbles and pulls out her phone. "Spikes? Wh— okay. K. Yeah, we're actually on our way back now. Bye."

They go to Bone Village, rock and dust and snow, and as a family – a sort of screwed up, dysfunctional but very real family, and the thought leaves Vincent with a sort of lump in his throat that is warm and cold – they trek through the forest that Vincent feels inside of him. It is very real and makes him want to sit, for a while, or for maybe much longer and the mako in his blood pulses in beat with the planet beneath him.

They walk into the most beautiful city Vincent thinks he's ever seen. Into a house, with a lake outside that feels so calm – steps, spiraling down –

And Aeris–

Their Aeris–

Her eyes are open when the long blade elegantly slides through her belly, slow and lovely like a waltz as she sags like a porcelain doll, her hair unraveling softly and the marble from its place atop her crown falling with honey-sweet _chinks_ off of the stone into the water on a beat all its own.

The last time Vincent sees Aeris, she is quietly sinking. (Her lips are still smiling.)

Yuffie cries hard.

Vincent sees her sitting limply, at first, and Red XIII wanders towards her aimlessly, curling up with his head buried in her lap while she strokes his fur with her slim fingers shivering.

It is only later when she does let it out. It's been a longhourlongdaylongweek, and they are all so very, very tired and Vincent feels it, too, cold and slippery as ice in a bucket to swallow up like fire.

Yuffie is outside of the inn they have crashed in. She is pouring tears and loneliness and unhappiness out her eyes and nose and mouth and ears, flooding, and his brain is empty and his hand throbs and his legs are numb and when he walks out into the snow, the screen door clacking shut behind him, she turns and for one immeasurable second watches him with soaking hair and clothes and frosty lashes and lips, and then barrels all ninety-something pounds of herself into his chest, pounding her tiny fists against him again and again in one mass of runny-nosed, red-faced crying, screaming Yuffie.

He waits, waits and waits and when she tires and collapses and just cries, just cries salt and mucus and water in great big plops to land on his shirt, he patiently picks her up like a young child, like a sick elder, and holds her quietly, rocking her gently with her skinny knees around his hips, with her small arms clutching at his back like a lifeline and his cold brass arm supporting her from underneath. He watches the snow and wonders what happened to them all before going inside to fall asleep in a chair, with her curled up like a wet cat on his lap, with her making him feel like a little boy wanting to crawl into her skin and never come out, listening to the sound of her soft breathing.

-

"It's a different perspective, from here." She points upwards with a grin in a clear, easy voice.

Yuffie is so very different around him, from the others.

They are both outcasts in their own right. And they identify with each other, to a point. And it is this common bond that sets them together as he is on the grass of the open field with Yuffie, spread out like feathers, soft and easy and everything good in the world to watch the marble-clear blue sky.

Something big is coming. And they both know it; the word _meteor _bounces around inside his skull like a stream, trickling and easy. It is so, so easy to stop thinking.

And for once, Vincent _lets_ him forget himself. Because he is weak and useless and tired, and she makes him think he needs this. So he does forget himself, and is relaxed and unworried while the planet seeps himself away into the good earth. For maybe the first time in a lifetime, Vincent is in awe of their world because he is being shown the big picture and doesn't notice the ants right now.

"It is the small things," and his voice floats upwards and echoes in the vast expanse of blue bleeding pink and yellow and orange.

"…I told you that to get something through your thick brain-skull-thingy, and you're just getting it now?"

He hears the smile in Yuffie's voice. It sounds very old and very young, and he decides that it is just Yuffie, who is timeless and unsure and livelier than Leviathan himself in the water. Yuffie, who laughs open and free because the wind carries her voice.

Tomorrow, they will awaken and she will once again be bearing the emotions of the group, she will once again flit between that young girl and that old woman, and he will remember himself and his shoulders will be weighted again, again just as always, and they will have things to do and miles to go and oceans to cross. Tomorrow brings dirt and darkness and loneliness, he knows.

Vincent feels like the (_girlchildwomanelder_) person beside him and doesn't think about that right now.

Somewhere near here, he hears children laughing.

* * *


	2. Rust

A/N: I've been writing a monster of a Yuffentine, and back in July I lost around five whole pages of it. While it doesn't seem like much, it felt like a huge chunk to me at the time and I refused to even think about writing more of it until I got it back. Well, the computer that ate it never did give it back, so in terrible bitterness I wrote this instead.

* * *

Rust

* * *

He is ten years over sixty when the birds stop singing and Yuffie is gone, left home with a note that says,

_I am gone and gone and gone forever and shit shit shit I am gone good-bye_

And Vincent does not understand until the day three months later when her medical records are discovered and Yuffie's headband is found in a river.

* * *

He often blames himself. He often blames others. But he doesn't blame Yuffie, never Yuffie, because Yuffie was Yuffie and how could he blame her when she always smiled, just in that one way, always smiled just like that and made it special just for him?

He can't, he couldn't, he could never - never, when she smiled, just for him, he-

Vincent misses Yuffie.

And it hurts.

* * *

He is seventeen years over sixty and his days are made of bumbling around his lonely house, doing nothing but sitting and reading and sleeping, and sometimes eating if Vincent remembers. He thinks.

The only time Vincent will step outside is when he wants to tend to the little garden out back. It is very pretty, and Vincent doesn't remember how it got there, but he always feels much better when he tries to clumsily water the plants. All grace is gone when he tries to help something, even if he can be the most lethal thing on Gaia when he tries to destroy.

It is one of these moments when he feels fine and almost normal, one of these moments that are few and far between while he is crouching outside in all the plants with twilight towering overhead, when he is paid a visit by a cat. It is a very young cat, less than a year old, and Vincent knows this because Yuffie once owned a dozen cats and enlisted him to help when three different cats had their litters at the same time, and he was stuck with several kittens of his own that he ended up dropping off for Marlene and Denzel.

This cat is one of the most wonderful things he's seen with matted fur, torn ears, starved belly and crooked tail. With the way its life is leading it, it probably doesn't have much longer left in this world, Vincent can surmise, and he wonders what keeps this small existence fueled. It approaches him with a high head regardless, as if it understands itself to be one of the most important things to walk the Planet, and carefully sits down facing him. It is black with large gray eyes and watches Vincent with what he assumes is curiosity.

He dips his head to it in silent acknowledgment and finishes watering the plants. When he moves to stand up, the cat moves so quickly Vincent does not even register what is happening until his cheek hurts, and the battered cat retracts its claws as three thin lines begin to dribble blood down his face. It cheekily jumps over the wall and, with one last flick of its broken tail, is gone.

Vincent watches the place where the cat disappeared for a long while until he goes inside to wipe off his already healed cheek, sitting down on a chair after.

These are what his days are made of, doing nothing but sitting and reading and sleeping and maybe eating if he remembers, and thinking too. He thinks often. Right now he thinks of life and death, and how strange friendship is. He thinks of how he was able to move on from the scientist but how he can't bring himself to stop pretending Yuffie is still alive, and he wonders why he keeps his phone on, waiting for a call that isn't coming.

* * *

He is twenty years over eighty when he doesn't like looking at anyone except Nanaki anymore, because Nanaki is the same and barely older. He tries helping the residents of Cosmo Canyon as best he can, feeling settled only when he and his old friend can talk comfortably as another day ends.

"You are very lonely," Nanaki observes as they sit in companionable not-silence at the top of the canyon, looking down at the not-city.

If anything, Nanaki is, too. Vincent knows this because in the past several years, the scientists (the ones who do not wear lab coats and are some of the nicest people Vincent has met) tried to clone Nanaki.

Vincent knows this because the first attempt failed. The second attempt yielded a young cub that collapsed just months in. The last attempt was a strong-willed female, to everyone's surprise, a strong-willed female that was more feline than canine with a feral smile so familiar and an affinity for games and trying to take things that weren't hers because she enjoyed it, and her only problem was that she couldn't speak, even if she had so much to say.

It hurt, a lot, when the respiratory problems caused by her blocked voice box made Vincent's new friend cry and cry and cry and curl up in his lap like the cub she wasn't anymore until she shivered and stopped moving.

"Perhaps," Vincent replies, and in his head Yuffie smiles and her laughter tinkles around like chimes in the breeze, in the house in the town he has not visited since he was seventy-two.

* * *

Vincent accepts it, one day.

He is sitting with Nanaki, early in the evening when the sun is still watching him, and they are outside on the cliff edge of where Bugenhagen's observatory stands, sitting with his legs hanging off and Nanaki's nose in danger of plummeting straight down to the canyons below or falling right up into the cosmos, and of which Vincent isn't sure.

They talk of life, renewal, death, emotions, and a lot of things Vincent usually doesn't like to vocalize. As they lapse into companionable silence, it dawns on Vincent suddenly that his phone isn't going to ring because only Yuffie calls it, and Yuffie is gone _(shitshit gone gone_)_, _good-bye, and she didn't say good-bye to him, not really.

He fishes his phone from his pocket carefully, his rusty old phone that is chipped and scratched and even bent where he once forgot and used his claw to answer it instead. Vincent looks at the PHS that still has many numbers, numbers that still work and numbers that have been out of commission for a long time, and drops it. He watches it fall down and hit a rock, sliding to hit another and another (_clack clack clack, shit shit shit gone forever good-bye_) until it is lost to the depths of the orange-red canyon.

This is when he cries.

* * *

He is seven years over ninety which is too old, too old, when he walks back to the house that Vincent surprisingly finds is still standing and still empty. It is old and lonely and dusty, which suits him well enough. Vincent cleans it out anyway.

The garden in the back has died. He can tell just by looking out the spotty window, and doesn't bother to go out. He is not a gardener.

Instead, after he wipes away the spiderwebs, brushes the dust off the cabinets, and tries to beat the dirt off a rug or two, Vincent leaves the house and walks to the market. He enjoys the atmosphere. He buys food and after goes home to put it into the old refrigerator, looking at the measly pile before closing the door and sitting down.

Vincent doesn't know what to do with himself. If anything, he is very weak, and a distraction sounds nice. He walks to the market the next day, and the day after that, too. He doesn't mind sitting on a bench and thinking as much as sitting alone and thinking. Sometimes he feels awkward when people look at him, because his claw is still strange and stuck over the hand that is probably rotten by now, so he buys a notebook and a pen and sits with both. He never uses them.

He does this all of November. When a girl offers him a scarf for ten gil one day, Vincent buys it without hesitation and his slim fingers pick the simple blue scarf. He imagines Yuffie scowling at him before snatching the orange scarf to wind it around herself laughingly, taking something not hers and enjoying it.

In December, Vincent notices a young boy that laughs a lot. He's amusing to watch, a beacon of true sunshine to the other people. This boy was the one to buy the orange scarf, and he has a bright smile with two missing teeth and gray eyes with circles that could rival Vincent's lining the bottoms of them. Some days Vincent doesn't see the boy help his brother sell the half-rotten fruit that Vincent wouldn't want to eat, compared to the much nicer selection down the rows of booths.

In January, he is startled to see the boy's picture in the obituaries of the local newspaper.

Vincent doesn't go to the market anymore.

* * *

"Did you love me?" Yuffie asks him one day.

This is the day Vincent goes into the garden and is surprised to find that it isn't dead at all. It is teeming with life, though of a good kind or bad, he isn't sure. Vincent has never been very good with understanding which plants are weeds and which plants are actual flowers, but the few bad ones he can spot he pulls. Yuffie sits on the single crumbling wall to his left, and he can see her yellow sneakers from the corner of his eye. She hasn't worn them since she was sixteen, he thinks. Her heels beat restlessly against the sun-dried bricks.

Vincent doesn't reply until he finishes pulling the last weed. After he sets it down carefully in the trash bag, he sits down and finds that he is afraid to look up. So he doesn't.

"Yes," he says honestly. His throat is made of sand-paper. She laughs at him.

"I'll be seeing you, Vinners," and she hops off the wall to walk away. When she is gone, Vincent tries to breathe, but it doesn't work very well. He slowly walks inside his house to drink warm water, and goes outside after to wait for a long time, until he wakes up again and is covered in dew, and she is still gone. He isn't very surprised, but his throat is still sandpaper

and it hurts.

* * *

Too old, too old and six years over one-hundred; Vincent is wandering around in a not-town still too small to be a city, the ratty little hotel room suiting him well enough. This place makes him think of deserted cities long dead, and he likes sitting in a chair and looking out the window that isn't as spotty as the ones in his house.

A young woman is standing on a corner, trying to sell flowers. She is lively and jumpy and very colorful, with a fast mouth and quick hands. He buys a flower from her one day, and she smiles brightly. He notices that she has shorter dark hair that is clumsily done up in a braid like a faulty imitation tied in an old ribbon, wearing a beautiful, spotted, torn skirt that's badly stitched and a short but blindingly orange shirt that bares a gaunt navel. She is a piece of patchwork and warms him.

Only later does Vincent realize that he is missing twenty gil. And only later than that, when he has returned home, does he realize that the talk of his own town is about the not-town once too small to be a city that burned down to the ground just yesterday with only a handful of survivors. Vincent checks the news. The patchwork girl is not one of them.

He stumbles from the house and falls into the bare wine cellar, lurching into an empty cabinet big enough to hold a huddling man. He doesn't so much as shift for years.

* * *

When Vincent is one year until hitting one-hundred-and-forty-three, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore and he leaves his little house, forgetting all the books and silences and small meals and garden. He has nothing more than the familiar, old old clothes on his back and the weight on his shoulders and the comforting presence of his gun in its holster.

When he leaves, he doesn't know where he's going, or why he's going, or when he's getting wherever it is that he's going to. He walks.

And when he walks, he sees eyes and smiles and tails and scarves all so familiar. He wonders if this is her way of telling him something.

He asks her one day. And this time he doesn't hesitate to look up (and is not surprised to find her headband missing). She is grinning at him like the ninja she still is, and she pulls at his hand and his cape and makes him stand up.

"You've been wondering that for a while, huh?" she asks. Vincent finds he can't say anything, like his voice box isn't working like the clone who wrote her name was Princess Aurora, and Yuffie's smile widens.

"I had to, y'know. I wasn't taking it drawn out and long. And it was so easy, and Aeris forgave me and shit, I'm sorry," she tells him while the grass moves beneath him.

Vincent dips his head in a nod and smiles a real one. Yuffie smiles again and disappears, and this time he does, too

and he is content.

* * *


	3. they slipped

they slipped

and they have fallen down, and they are everything that makes up Humpty Dumpty who can't get up because he fell down, too, and they hate each other for it and they love each other for it and right now they don't think because they are hurting and they want to _hurt_.

"Get up," she says, because she is the more provoking half and she scrambles and kicks his leg as hard as she can, with mud bloody and blood muddy on her arms on her legs and neck and face.

"Get up," she repeats, and this time he snarls because he is the more turbulent of the two and he knocks her chin stupidly and she pulls his hair dumbly and they can't get up, not for the life of them, until Vincent can't help himself and punches her in the jaw and Yuffie pounds his head with her fist and they both see stars, angry and forever spinning, and the mud caking his brass boots makes them so, so heavy.

"Get up," says him with a terrible kind of roar in his throat, angry at her, angry at him, angry at the world, and his eyes are yellow and his gauntlet's claws dig into the dirt and the mud, and there is so, so much mud. He towers over her but can't stand up because she can't, either, so she pushes him backwards with enough force that they topple over seeing stars angry and forever spinning so heavily, and she pounds his chest and he backhands her and her knee meets his stomach. They are avalanches and landslides and fire, and they are absolutely nothing because they can't think and all they can think is _eggshells, eggshells, eggshells_.

"Get up get up get up _shit_," says her swollen mouth and she tries and her legs are shaking so bad that he claws at her knee that buckles and bleeds worse than his face when she scratched him, and she snarls and jabs a point on the back of his neck that sends a shooting, terrifying bolt of lightning straight up his spine to his brain that fries and short-circuits everything. His eyes open for the first time again and he grabs her to crash his forehead into hers, and they both see stars, angry and forever spinning, while the mud coating them like a second skin is so, so heavy that they both splutter and choke and cough and drown in the mud inside their lungs.

This is the part where they collapse on the ground as it rains, sprawled across each other in the strangest amalgamation of Yuffie-Vincent, heaving and panting and bone-tired.

They have been so very, very frustrated, and nothing has changed between them because this isn't anything new, and they are both ready to stop raging and lick each other's wounds now. They stay still until they feel like they may very well bleed out, until Yuffie finally revives herself, crawling through the mud (mud, mud,_ everywhere_, where did all this mud come from?) to curl up on his side, because she is the more provoking half. And he slowly tucks her into his side, because he is the more turbulent of the two. And they hide from the noise underneath his cloak, huddled like children and stooped scared soldiers, wondering when the Restore materia will do its job and after healing the outside heal the inside, too.

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* * *

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I pounded this out as a prototype for a scene I'll be writing in the future for a multi-chapter story. Working out the mechanics of _how_ they get to this point is what I've been working on lately, but writing them _at_ this terrible, sort of half-gone point is just wicked fun.


End file.
